Robin Black - Life Drawing

“Is it a war thing?” Nora asked. “An antiwar thing, I mean?”

“Not really. I really don’t know.” The same questions that from Laine had felt so like help, now felt like an attack of some kind.

“Is it something about them being local? Like part of the history of this place? Like documenting a forgotten part of history?”

“Documenting history? No.” I looked over to Alison, who showed no sign of leaping to my aid. “I don’t really like to talk about my work while I’m doing it,” I said, though at least two people there knew that was a lie. “I’m sorry. It’s just not part of how I work. Being questioned and all. It makes me uncomfortable.”

“Oh, well,” Alison said, finally snapping into action. “That’s completely understandable. And anyway, who ever knows why we do what we do? I can certainly give a cogent explanation for why I’m fascinated by the petal of a rose, but who knows if it’s close to accurate?”

“I’m sorry,” Nora said. “I’m just … I just think it’s really interesting.”

“Me too,” Alison said. “But right now, I’m more interested in dessert.”

Later, Owen accused me of snapping at Nora. “She’s just a kid, a curious kid.”

“She was badgering me. I didn’t want to be badgered.” We were sitting in the living room, a fire still glowing. We had spent the last hour or so tidying up with little conversation. “And I wasn’t rude to her,” I said, though I knew I had been. “I was just clear.”

“You didn’t hear your tone.”

“Maybe she’ll learn a lesson, then. Isn’t that what curious kids are supposed to do? I don’t understand why everyone is always leaping to her defense. No. That’s not true. I do understand why Alison does. I’m just hoping I don’t understand why you do.”

“I’m not leaping to her defense. In part I’m asking you if you want to be seen as attacking her. It’s, it’s maybe not how you want to appear.”

“Oh, please, let me worry about how I appear. What about how she appears?”

He didn’t say anything.

“She’s been chasing after you since the night she arrived,” I said. “Father figure, my ass.”

He waited a moment to speak. “We’ve never exchanged an inappropriate word,” he said. “If that’s what all this is about. I’m a model of propriety around her. I morph back into my sexless professorial persona.”

“But please tell me you’ll at least admit she has the world’s biggest crush on you?”

“I admit that she may be infatuated, in a harmless, unserious way.”

“I’m not so sure about harmless. And I don’t think I was rude to her.”

“Just relax, Gus. Nora isn’t a threat.”

“Nora.” I said it as if it were a preposterous word. I stood and walked toward the fire, poked at the embers just a bit. “Perfect little Nora. Except of course she isn’t little. She’s more like some kind of Amazon.”

He laughed and joined me, drew me to him in a hug, taking the poker from my hand, leaning it against the fireplace. “Do you know what I’m thankful for?” he asked, smoothing my hair from my face, tucking a few loose strands behind my ears.

“For an adoring twenty-two-year-old who looks at you like you’re God and some kind of movie star all rolled into one?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” he said, and then kissed me, slowly, a little forcefully. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said. He slipped his hand into mine. “Let’s both of us display a little gratitude for what we have.”

After that, the subject of Nora felt newly out of bounds. I had raised it and Owen had reassured me. What’s more, he had done so without dredging up the past. That felt like some kind of freebie to me. But to broach the subject again was to doubt his word, and to doubt his word was to drag out the whole question of whose word was and was not to be believed. And the past would never stay asleep through that, I knew.

None of this was said or even hinted at, but years of navigating these waters had given me a decent instinct for managing the nasty currents that still ran through. A certain kind of avoidance had become second nature to me.

So I watched in silence as November slid away, holding my tongue about the frequency of Nora’s visits to the barn. But I began to make excuses to minimize the number of dinners we all shared each week. I couldn’t imagine how Alison was letting this all go on, couldn’t bear to hear from her about Owen’s positive influence again, and I would have started to avoid her even more during the days, except she beat me to the punch. No more knocks at my kitchen door, no more suggestions that we run errands together or just go for a walk.

My work suffered. Even I, with my near-lifelong ability to shut out upsetting situations and isolate myself, could not achieve the necessary detachment from our daily tensions to stay productive doing what Laine had advised me to do, to play , to have fun with it, to stop worrying about the quality and be willing to fail. And so I shifted my eyes once again from the figures in the paintings and set about perfecting what surrounded them. You cannot fight fire with fire. You cannot fight the sensation of losing control with the sensation of being out of control.

So the interior of my house on these canvases daily took on a more and more polished sheen, while the inhabitants of the paintings, like those of the house itself, were daily more evidently out of place.

On the calendar in our kitchen, the words Cape Cod and a question mark, all in Owen’s handwriting, hovered over the middle of the month. We were coming to the time he had thought might be right for our annual winter visit to his parents; but he’d said nothing about it for weeks. And I suspected that he wouldn’t unless I raised the matter. And even if I did, I thought he might well trump my desire to get away for a few days with his need to keep working now that things were rolling along. But then, one afternoon when he came in from work, he popped into the studio and asked what I thought of taking a day or so to pack and then head up north.

“It’s a good time for my parents,” he said. “And a good time for me too. How about you?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” I said.

The drive from our home up to the Cape and all the way to Wellfleet is about eight hours in the summer, sometimes even ten, but more like six and a half on a Wednesday in December when the notion of that unprotected elbow of land jutting into the Atlantic carries far less universal appeal. Owen and I — unsurprisingly enough — preferred the Cape off-season, the site of a party long ended, a few guests inexplicably remaining. His parents had first moved there from Boston nearly twenty years before, and during their early summers, we’d visited during the height of the madness and heat, a period they loved and seemed to draw energy from. But pretty soon, we began limiting our very occasional trips there to chilly days in bleak months, enduring their eye-rolling jokes over our poor timing and wrong preferences, our perverseness and also our inherently gloomy characters.

“Only the naturally lugubrious would prefer Wellfleet in February,” Lillian said.

“That’s us,” Owen had cheerfully replied. “Naturally lugubrious and proud of it.”

In general, over the years, we would spend the hours of the drive talking about his parents, as if desensitizing ourselves in anticipation of the exposure. Not that they were as toxic as all that, but there was a way in which the idea of a sudden encounter was like the idea of falling unprepared into an icy stream.